Patrick Hanlon is recognized as one leading branding practitioners in the world. He is ceo and founder of THINKTOPIA®, a global brand and strategic innovation practice for Fortune 100 clients including American Express, Levis, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Kraft Foods, Johnson & Johnson, Yum! Foods, Wrigley, PayPal, Gap, the United Nations and others. His book Primal Branding: Create Zealots For Your Brand, Your Company And Your Future was published by Simon & Schuster/Free Press and is listed as one of the Top 10 books in marketing and branding. Primal Branding® is the seminal book on brands as belief systems—and in 2006 anticipated creating social communities around brands, whether products and services, personality brands, political or civic movements, or actual civic communities.
Primal Branding is mandatory reading at YouTube, the largest social engagement platform on the planet, as their recommended construct for designing and attracting online social communities.
Hanlon’s new book The Social Code: Designing Community In The Digital Age defines how to create communities of advocates who become so passionate about your success, they are willing to create it themselves.
Hanlon has been a keynote or guest speaker at IDEO, HP Innovation Series, New York University, American Marketing Association, American Advertising Federation, Syracuse University, Urban Land Institute, and elsewhere. He has also been a featured speaker in emerging geographies including China, India, and South America.
Hanlon has been featured, quoted, or interviewed in Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Inc., Advertising Age, National Public Radio, CNBC, FOX and frequent overseas publications. Hanlon is listed as one of the Top 50 people to follow on Twitter, Top 50 Over 50 in Marketing, and is an online contributor for Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., Medium and other publications.

Conscious Capitalism: Can Empathy Change The World?

Former economics professor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus was reportedly the first to use the term ‘conscious capitalism’. But are you a conscious capitalist from the beginning, or do you become one? It’s not always a straight line.

“The answer is, many start out this way anyway,” explains Klein. “Many younger entrepreneurs think this way anyway. Some simply are conscious capitalists. Some are unconscious conscious capitalists. And some companies look at conscious capitalism in various ways and say, ‘This is a better and more effective way of doing business, we need to change.’ It’s just common sense.”

Growing sensibilities toward the new social enterprise have given rise to a new legal description for corporations, called the B Corporation.

“B Corps are a new type of corporation to use the power of business to help solve social and environmental problems,” says Katie Kerr, of B Lab, a group that certifies and supports B corporations. “Government and nonprofits are great,” says Kerr. “But if we can take the power of business to create more positive impact, we can create better communities, create better environments, and become a stronger positive force.”

The very first B corporation was founded in 2007. Today, there are over 600 B corporations accounting for revenues of over $4 billion in 13 countries around the world.

B corporations wanting to be certified must follow specific guidelines in terms of governance, its workers (every stakeholders gets a vote not just stockholders), the community, the environment, and it must be a beneficial business model that gives back.

“Ultimately we want to create a new sector of the economy,” says Kerr. “These companies are working together to be not just the best in the world, but the best for the world.”

This in itself, of course, is not a new idea. The Social Venture Network, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, is at least one organization founded on the notion of supporting entrepreneurs who want to create a values-driven and sustainable world.

“Our main purpose is to convene, inspire, and promote people who are mission-driven entrepreneurs,” says Social Venture Network executive director Deb Nelson. Some of the organization’s most recognizable members include the founders of The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, Clif Bar, Odwalla, Tom’s of Maine, Birkenstock, Seventh Generation, Stonyfield Farm, and Eileen Fisher.

“Over the course of the past 25 years, our organization has helped these people go mainstream,” says Nelson. “It’s gone from being a radical idea, to today when they’re considered visionaries.”

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B Corps and Forbes helping us learn about the option is for me a beautiful rose in late winter. My students at the University of Denver are discussing the need to balance systemic, sustainable organizational soundness with corporate responsibility to serve shareholder above all else, and how to attract, develop and retain talent in that environment. I’m choosing to work only with clients who share these values, as I’ve found it is a cornerstone of success and a critical success factor for me personally to professionally engage. Thank you, thank you, as I wasn’t aware of the legal structure before.

Like Carol (above) you might also like this: Design Thinking for Social Good: An Interview with David Kelley – Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/22/design-thinking-for-social-goo.html via @BoingBoing

So I guess this smoke will really do the trick. What do you think? How many hits for this one? I know in the ’60′s they really weeded it up. That stuff made you a “master of the enigmatic laws of the universe.” You could actually “see” Darth Vader doing the moon walk on a clear summer’s night….years before the actual “battles.”

Now, these days, here in the roaring 2000′s, we’ve apparently a renewed generation of these cosmonautic visionaries. My guess is that they must have stumbled upon some pretty “good” smokeless Panamanian micro chips.

Tremendous article. I had the pleasure of attending Ashoka’s “Disruption in Higher Education” conference in February, 2012. Have signed up to follow your articles. Empathic Education. www.empathiceducation.com

Thanks Carol! You might also like this: Design Thinking for Social Good: An Interview with David Kelley – Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/09/22/design-thinking-for-social-goo.html via @BoingBoing

In a recent business lecture of mine we were posed with a question. “What comes first in creating a business: Profit or Stakeholder Value?” Without hesitation our class began do discuss the importance creating value to stakeholders and creating a company that lives by its mission. Profit may be the blood of business but it will be really hard to pump that blood without the heart. The heard being the pursuit of value, or how this article describes it, “conscious capitalism.” I am excited to be part of a growing shift in the business environment where entrepreneurial motivation meets passion for social change.

I believe it can and already has. I wrote an article ‘Love and Compassion’ in business recently to describe the influence of humanists like Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Carl Rogers and Leo Tolstoy on an alternative to traditional capitalism known as people-centered economic development.

I offer a quote from a since deceased colleague who helped me set up a business for social benefit in the UK:

‘The term “social enterprise” in the various but similar forms in which it is being used today — 2008 — refers to enterprises created specifically to help those people that traditional capitalism and for profit enterprise don’t address for the simple reason that poor or insufficiently affluent people haven’t enough money to be of concern or interest. Put another way, social enterprise aims specifically to help and assist people who fall through the cracks. Allowing that some people do not matter, as things are turning out, allows that other people do not matter and those cracks are widening to swallow up more and more people. Social enterprise is the first concerted effort in the Information Age to at least attempt to rectify that problem, if only because letting it get worse and worse threatens more and more of us. Growing numbers of people are coming to understand that “them” might equal “me.” Call it compassion, or call it enlightened and increasingly impassioned self-interest. Either way, we are all in this together, and we will each have to decide for ourselves what it means to ignore someone to death, or not.’

From a 1996 paper on an alternative to tradional capitalism, he took the concept of business for social purpose to those who were considered valueless – children institutionalised in Eastern Europe because of their disabilities.

After his death, I looked back at what had influenced his thinking on compassion.